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Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent
by Peter Kennard
(Pluto Press, £19.99)
“IT IS not surprising that photomontage is associated particularly with the political left, because it is ideally suited to the expression of the Marxist dialectic.”
Thus wrote Dawn Ades in her authoritative 1976 book Photomontage, the revised edition of which carries commentary on two of Peter Kennard’s most distinctive assemblies — the 1980 Haywain with Cruise Missiles and his frightening 1982 photomontage Defenders to Death.
The continuities between Kennard's work and that of the German John Heartfield — the communist creator of political photomontage — demonstrates the power of the technique and how it is so effective in disrupting the dominant ideology.
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